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It may be hard to model, but I would have liked to see how Asset Voting compared to the other voting systems. Asset Voting seems to be almost unheard of, even

It may be hard to model, but I would have liked to see how Asset Voting compared to the other voting systems. Asset Voting seems to be almost unheard of, even among voting reform enthusiasts, despite being over 100 years old and one of the simplest systems out there. Basically it works the same way as a FPTP election, except that after the votes are counted, the losing candidates one by one get to reassign their votes to a remaining candidate. It doesn't guarantee proportional representation, but it does solve the spoiler problem and doesn't force voters to decide whether to "approve" of a weakly-disliked candidate, or how to rank multiple candidates. The ballot papers wouldn't even have to change their instructions, and it can be easily counted by hand, allowing the votes for each candidate to be placed in their own stack, which makes the process more transparent.

vlovich123 5y ago
That’s an interesting concept although it does set the likely stage that a candidate pisses off their base by making some kind of personally politically convenient deal. Also the strong opening it leaves for even the appearance of corruption isn’t my favorite property. Are there real works examples of how such systems operate in practice?
- nicopappl 5y ago
  Yes, Swiss federal parliamentary elections have a similar system. The name of the other parties your vote goes to if the one you voted for didn’t pass is printed on the voting bulletin. The system is a bit more complex, since it’s for the parliament and you aren’t really voting for parties, but for lists, and the votes get transferred depending on how many seats the list filled, but the basic idea is here. This actually influenced my voting choice. I went for a more niche party who had little chance to get a seat. I knew that if it didn’t get enough votes to get a seat, my vote wouldn’t go to waste. It would go to the larger party which already has many seats but doesn’t align with my political views as well as the niche one. It turned out well since the niche party got a seat despite the polling predictions.
Sniffnoy 5y ago
I've seen some voting systems include a "delegation" feature, where instead of submitting a full ranking of candidates (or whatever), you can just vote for a single candidate and your full ballot will be determined by their full ballot. What you're describing seems to be basically IRV but where you are forced to delegate? (OK, I guess the runoff isn't truly instant, but still.) I worry that this might have the same sort of monotonicity problems as IRV normally does, only in terms of the candidates' ballots instead of the voters'.

vlovich123 5y ago

That’s an interesting concept although it does set the likely stage that a candidate pisses off their base by making some kind of personally politically convenient deal. Also the strong opening it leaves for even the appearance of corruption isn’t my favorite property. Are there real works examples of how such systems operate in practice?

nicopappl 5y ago
Yes, Swiss federal parliamentary elections have a similar system. The name of the other parties your vote goes to if the one you voted for didn’t pass is printed on the voting bulletin. The system is a bit more complex, since it’s for the parliament and you aren’t really voting for parties, but for lists, and the votes get transferred depending on how many seats the list filled, but the basic idea is here. This actually influenced my voting choice. I went for a more niche party who had little chance to get a seat. I knew that if it didn’t get enough votes to get a seat, my vote wouldn’t go to waste. It would go to the larger party which already has many seats but doesn’t align with my political views as well as the niche one. It turned out well since the niche party got a seat despite the polling predictions.

Sniffnoy 5y ago

I've seen some voting systems include a "delegation" feature, where instead of submitting a full ranking of candidates (or whatever), you can just vote for a single candidate and your full ballot will be determined by their full ballot. What you're describing seems to be basically IRV but where you are forced to delegate? (OK, I guess the runoff isn't truly instant, but still.) I worry that this might have the same sort of monotonicity problems as IRV normally does, only in terms of the candidates' ballots instead of the voters'.